As we move through this season of Advent, this season of preparation for the Festival arrival of our Savior the Christ child, we Prepare to welcome Joy incarnate.

But what does this Preparation look like, and what does this Joy mean?

I imagine that many of us have heard and are familiar with the words from Isaiah, associated with John the Baptist: “Prepare the way of the Lord!” Yet We may be less familiar with another portion of this same passage, in which the prophet Isaiah says that this preparation is so that “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

Some day I want to be part of staging the biggest Christmas Pageant ever!

There will be beautiful organ music playing and a gigantic children and adult’s choir singing classical Christmas carols, but there will also be an African steel drum band and interpretive dance ensemble. The woman who designed the larger than life animal puppets (carried by two people each) for the Lion King on Broadway will create animals for the manger scene. We’ll build an actual stable, complete with hayloft and cooing doves. We’ll set up the stable far ahead of time and outside somewhere so that real animals can live inside for a while so that the whole area, even after it is cleansed from all that animals can leave behind that we’d rather none of the actors step in, have a more authentic smell and feel to it. There will be real flying angels – children strapped in harnesses singing “Glory to God in the Highest and Peace to God’s people on earth.” This staging of the Christmas Nativity will be multicultural and multinational. I’m thinking Disney meets the United Nations meets the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall meets the acrobatic circus Cirque De Soleil.

As a child I was given a small wooden box in the shape of a heart. I’m not sure if it was for my birthday or for Christmas. I’m not sure if it came from my parents or maybe from my maternal grandmother. But I remember that it was beautiful, stained and polyurethaned, with vines stenciled on the front.

And I knew I only wanted to put truly special things in that heart shaped box. Such as the small garnet stones I had gotten in the Adirondacks or the baby tooth I had from when I was little (I was 8 years old by the time I received this box, after all, practically grown up in my own mind).

I treasured that box and I treasured and pondered the things it held for me, the treasures inside; what they meant in and of themselves, and what they meant to me, the one lucky enough to be entrusted with them.

Sharing Christ's Welcome

We do so by striving to be a church that embodies and embraces Christ's commandment to love one another as Christ first loved us, and to ensure there is a place for you here. We are liberated by our faith and we embrace you as a whole person--questions, complexities and all.